Monday, January 16, 2012

On Martin Luther King Day, here's a repeat of my St. Patrick's Day post:

With parades and parties, we take St. Patrick’s Day more
lightly than other holidays. We treat it more as a celebration than a moment
for solemn reflection. This is a wonderful thing, not only for the joy it
brings, but because there is hope in the fact that we allow the deeper meaning
of the day to pass unnoticed.

Our
youngest national holiday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, during which we not
only commemorate the life of a peaceful leader who stood for justice and
morality, but take time to contemplate the ways in which our culture and social
structures still embody unfairness toward groups of Americans.

Though we seldom stop to think of it, St. Patrick’s Day
stands for all that we wish for eight weeks earlier on Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s birthday. The mass Irish migration to America occurred in the first half
of the 19th century and was met with fear, hatred and bigotry.

Overt job discrimination was rampant as every Irish worker
knew of the “No Irish Need Apply” signs and the same sort of vitriolic rhetoric
was voiced toward them as we see now against Spanish-speaking immigrants. The
Know Nothing Party was organized specifically to undermine the political power
of Irish Catholics. Kids today have no sense whatsoever how momentous it was in
1960 to have John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, elected president of the
United States.

But the fact that anti-Irish discrimination is no longer a
part of our collective consciousness is precisely what makes St. Patrick’s Day
so wonderful. We do not use St. Patrick’s Day to celebrate Irish-American
liberation and equality, we just use it to celebrate Irish culture.

Irish-Americans are now considered as American as anyone
else, but this is not the result of complete assimilation. Irish-Americans were
not made to surrender their identities. A decade and a half after Frank McCourt
won the Pulitzer Prize for “Angela’s Ashes” and “Riverdance” sold out show
after show, we see the Irish as contributing positively to the larger culture
and on St. Patrick’s Day everyone partakes in the celebration of that
contribution.

St. Patrick’s Day stands as a monument to cosmopolitanism,
to the view that we are strongest not when we are homogenized, when our
differences are stripped away in favor of a single way of being, but rather
when we embrace differences and seek to understand how other ways of
experiencing the world can be used to augment, to enrich our own limited
perspective.

Ferdinand Tonnies, a founding father of sociology, argued
that there is a difference between communities — groups bound together by what
they have in common — and societies — which are created of distinct groups. It
is human nature, he claimed, that communities would create societies, that no
matter how similar the members of the group, we inevitably find ways to divide
ourselves up, of creating us versus them situations.

As human beings, we naturally try to exclude, shut out and
minimize others. St. Patrick’s Day gives us hope that it can be different. That
we can not only peaceably coexist, but that we can cherish and benefit from our
diversity.

Martin
Luther King, Jr. Day is an important holiday because it forces us to focus on
the places in our cultures where we erect boundaries, hurdles and brick walls
to keep those who are different from fully realizing themselves as citizens and
complete human beings in our society.

There remain major impediments to the full equality of many
Americans. But while the heaviness of such a task should make us pause, the
levity of St. Patrick’s Day should urge us forward, providing us with a success
story that it can be done.

We can bring people into the family without forcing them to
give up what makes them special. This sort of inclusion enriches us all. When
it is said that on St. Patrick’s Day “everyone has a little Irish in them,” it
acknowledges the ways in which we are a better culture for having added another
set of experiences.

This is why, despite the fact that I am not Irish, I
celebrate St. Patrick’s Day as one of the great American holidays and lift a
glass of Guinness to toast the legacy of The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in
hope that someday we will have created a society so moral, fair and mindful
that his birthday, too, can be celebrated in the same way.